“Long-awaited, this full-scale revision of Impressionism immediately supersedes all other studies in the field. Herbert rejuvenates even the most famous paintings by seeing them in a dense and flexible context touching on everything from the hierarchy of theater boxes to the role of beer-hall waitresses. His mind and eye are as supple as his lucid prose, and his command of sociological data is staggering. In this classic of art history, both art and history are triumphantly reborn.”―Robert Rosenblum, New York University This remarkable book will transform the way we look at Impressionist art. The culmination of twenty years of research by a preeminent scholar in the field, it fundamentally revises the conventional view of the Impressionist movement and shows for the first time how it was fully integrated into the social and cultural life of the times. Robert L. Herbert explores the themes of leisure and entertainment that dominated the great years of Impressionist painting between 1865 and 1885. Cafes, opera houses, dance halls, theaters, racetracks, and vacations by the sea were the central subjects of the majority of these paintings, and Herbert relates these pursuits to the transformation of Paris under the Second Empire. Sumptuously illustrated with many of the most beautiful Impressionist images, both familiar and unfamiliar, this book presents provocative new interpretations of a wide range of famous masterpieces. Artists are seen to be active participants in, as well as objective witnesses to, contemporary life, and there are many profound insights into the social and cultural upheaval of the times. “A social history of Impressionist art that is truly about the art, informed by a penetrating analysis of the ways in which its pictorial structure and qualities communicate its social content. Herbert brings that society to life, but above all he makes some of the most familiar and frequently discussed works in the history of art come wonderfully and vividly to life again.”―Theodore Reff, Columbia University Robert L. Herbert is Robert Lehman Professor of the History of Art at Yale University. He is the author or editor of numerous books and articles on nineteenth-century French art.

Impressionism: Art, Leisure, and Parisian Society

Arts & Photography

Herbert, Robert L.

History & Criticism

Yale University Press

Monet on the Normandy Coast: Tourism and Painting, 1867-1886

In this magnificently illustrated book, Robert L. Herbert, author of the acclaimed Impressionism: Art, Leisure, and Parisian Society, presents a new interpretation of Monet's beautiful seascapes of the Normandy coast. Discussing more than fifty works, Herbert shows how these splendid pictures of Etretat and other resorts reflect the dialogue between the modern city and pre-modern nature that underlay tourism. Interweaving the colorful history of sea resorts, stylistic analysis, details of Monet's life, and reflections on the marketing of his art, this book offers a fascinating new perspective on some of the artist's most beloved works.Herbert points out that in early paintings at Sainte-Adresse and Trouville Monet represented vacationers and resort leisure, but when he returned to the Normandy coast in the early 1880s, he painted lonely views that eliminated all signs of tourism. He shows that generations of vacationers seeking these views had transformed fishing villages into resorts, even as they wished to preserve the illusions of a pre-modern seacoast. Monet's modernity lay in the production of neo-romantic myths, illusions of spontaneous responses to untouched nature that were welcomed by Parisian galleries and international collectors. At the same time, Herbert notes, modernity is also found in Monet's evocative brushwork and color and in his dramatic bird's-eye views, which speak to modern culture's search for personal release from the workplace.

Georges Seurat, painter of Sunday on the Island of La Grande Jatte, had a meteoric career that ended in 1891 with his death at age 31. In this generously illustrated book, the leading specialist on Seurat examines the entire range of the artist's work, focusing on individual paintings and drawings and interpreting the personal and social meanings of their subjects. 
Robert L. Herbert closely examines Seurat's early oil panels of rural and suburban settings, early drawings of Parisians at work and leisure, and later canvases and drawings of café- concerts and circuses. Showing that Seurat's work drew on classical tradition as well as on popular arts, Herbert reevaluates the artist's painting technique and argues that individual pictures reveal artistic craft and trial and error rather than a "scientific" nature. And he demonstrates that although Seurat's drawings and paintings have striking formal structures, they are not "abstract," but rather poetic distillations of social and psychological meanings. 
This collection of the most influential of Herbert's writings on Seurat, long out of print, bear out the praise he has received for "his ability to mix a deep knowledge of paintings and drawings as physical objects with an acute awareness of the way they embody ideas and can be understood as social documents" (Jack Flam, New York Review of Books). This attractive book will appeal both to the general reader and to the student of French nineteenth-century art.

Seurat: Drawings and Paintings

The definitive overview of the work and life of Seurat, the great Neo-impressionist artist.

Georges Seurat 1859-1891

Herbert et al., Professor Robert L.

Individual Artists

Metropolitan Museum of Art

A pre-eminent scholar of nineteenth- and twentieth-century French art, Robert L. Herbert has written extensively on aspects of this subject during his long career. This book brings together some of his most important essays, works that discuss the artistic and social issues that lie behind the surfaces of notable prints and paintings by such artists as Millet, Courbet, Daubigny, Monet, Pissarro, Signac, Delaunay, Léger, and Ernst. In an introduction prepared for this volume, Herbert explains that these essays are linked by a focus on the relation of art to the urban-industrial revolution. 
The first three essays explore how artists in the second half of the nineteenth century were attracted to images of rural life and landscape as a reaction to growing industrialization and urbanization, at the same time creating new techniques and pictorial devices whose radical inventions opposed the dominant forms and subjects of academic art. Four essays then address issues of overt social and political opposition among artists, demonstrating that these oppositions were in fact embraced within modernist capitalism as correctives to outmoded traditions. The concluding essays center on Léger and the period from 1910 to 1925, in which there was a sudden acceptance of industrial imagery and the creation of forms that expressed the dynamism and fragmentation of modern culture. Written in a lively and accessible style, this book will appeal to students, scholars, and lovers of French art.

From Millet to Leger: Essays in Social Art History

To mark the centenary of Georges Seurat's death in 1891, the Réunion des Musées Nationaux/Musée d'Orsay and The Metropolitan Museum of Art organized a landmark retrospective, Georges Seurat, 1859–1891, which will be seen on both sides of the Atlantic. In this exhibition and publication, such masterpieces as Parade de cirque, Cirque, and Jeune femme se poudrant, and an extraordinary group of seascapes testify to Seurat's pictorial ambitions. His splendid drawings in conté crayon place him, with Ingres, among the greatest draftsmen of the nineteenth century. These sheets and the beautiful series of small paintings on wood―his croquetons (little sketches)―give a more intimate view of Seurat. A large number of works are exhibited together for the first time, thanks to the generosity of private collectors. This publication is meant to stimulate a fresh view of Seurat as well as to display his work. A century after Seurat's death, we are now able to correct some of the myths that grew up around him. Because he died at the age of thirty-one, he was long believed to have produced only a few pictures and to have died of consumption or some other frailty (so tenacious is the romantic paradigm of an early death). To the contrary, he was tall for his era (five feet, nine and one-half inches), and his friends always described him as being robust, but he ultimately succumbed to an epidemic of virulent diphtheria. As for his productivity, from his one decade of maturity there survive six huge canvases and sixty smaller ones, about 170 wood panels, 230 completed drawings, and fourty-five studies or fragmentary drawings, among other works. Harder to overcome than the myth of a frail, unproductive artist is the idea that Seurat's work was all but abstract, that the heart of his art lay not in his subjects but in his geometric compositions which presented summary types rather than individual humans. This book contests that Seurat's types are not "abstract"―that they are not the residue of a purely formal instinct but are brilliant visual distillations of psychological and social meanings. [This book was originally published in 1991 and has gone out of print. This edition is a print-on-demand version of the original book.]

Georges Seurat, 1859–1891

Tinterow, Gary

Cachin, Françoise

Stein, Susan Alyson

Distel, Anne

Ruskin was the most important aesthetic arbiter of the 19th century. In "The Stones of Venice", "Modern Painters" and "Seven Lamps of Architecture" he developed rules and standards that are contemporary in their range of sympathies. However, Ruskin also wrote thousands of pages of criticism. This anthology by Robert Herbert contains the essential thought of Ruskin on architecture, painting, sculpture and the relationship of art to its social and moral context.

The Art Criticism Of John Ruskin

Da Capo Press

"The miracle of La Grande Jatte is its coincidence of critical distinction and popular celebration. High, low, mass, and popular cultures meet in mutual delight, continuing to revel in the mysteries of that Parisian Sunday."—from "The Park in the Museum" by Neil Harris "Bedlam," "scandal," and "hilarity" were among the epithets used to describe the effect of what is now considered Georges Seurat's greatest work, and one of the most remarkable paintings of the nineteenth century, when it was first exhibited in Paris in 1886. A Sunday on La Grande Jatte—1884, an extensive landscape peopled with over forty figures, took the artist almost two years to complete. This sumptuous book, created to accompany a major exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago, provides a fascinating, in-depth examination of the gestation, execution, and influence of Seurat's masterpiece. La Grande Jatte has been part of the Art Institute of Chicago's collection since 1926. Bringing together all known studies and drawings directly related to the painting, this volume provides a visual and contextual survey of Seurat's working methods and aesthetic priorities, as well as the evolutionary process that culminated in his singular achievement. Included are more than fifty-five preparatory works, ranging from rich conté crayon drawings to oil sketches on small wood panels to larger studies painted on canvas. In their quantity, intricacy, and variety, these works reveal a compositional process that harks back to Old Master traditions and methods, which had been largely abandoned by Seurat's immediate predecessors, the Impressionists. The many studies attest to the artist's ambitions for his masterpiece and open up a broader context for understanding the work. Seurat scholar Robert L. Herbert makes new revelations about the painting's relationship to its preparatory studies, stressing Seurat's empirical craftmanship. He compares La Grande Jatte to paintings by Monet, Renoir, Pissarro, and Signac and analyzes the ways that twentieth-century critics, including Meyer Schapiro, T.J. Clark, and Linda Nochlin, have viewed the picture. He proposes that the enduring fascination of the famous canvas comes from Seurat's mixture of fashion and irony. Also giving new perspectives in this book, the noted cultural historian Neil Harris charts how and why La Grande Jatte attained its revered status at the Art Institute of Chicago and throughout the United States. Additionally, the exhibition's cocurators examine the painting's place in the museum's collection. Essays by Art Institute conservators show how Seurat transferred and altered figures from studies to final canvas and elucidate the exact nature of his pigments and brushwork. Color scientist Roy Berns traces the efforts to digitally recapture the original hues of Seurat's time-altered masterpiece. A landmark publication, this book provides dazzling proof of why La Grande Jatte is among the most frequently reproduced paintings in the world and why it continues to fascinate scholars and art lovers today.

Seurat and the Making of La Grande Jatte

University of California Press

Black and white illustrations throughout. A full-color pull-out of the work appears at the end of the book. Bibliography. Index. The Lictors Bring to Brutus the Bodies of His Sons (1789) is a work in oils by the French artist Jacques-Louis David. It was unveiled in the politically charged era of the French Revolution and is a bold allegory of civic virtue.

David, Voltaire, Brutus and the French Revolution: an essay in art and politics (Art in Context)

Literature & Fiction

The Viking Press

David, Voltaire, "Brutus", and the French Revolution: An essay in art and politics, (Art in context)

Allen Lane.

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